Tag Archives: Survived

I wish I didn’t have to say this. I wish I could look in the eyes of every victim of the last Panda 4.1 update and tell them it was something new, something unforeseeable, something out of their control. I wish I could tell them that Google pulled a fast one that no one saw coming. But I can’t.

Like many in the industry, I have been studying Panda closely since its inception. Google gave us a rare glimpse behind the curtain by providing us with the very guidelines they set in place to build their massive machine-learned algorithm which came to be known as Panda. Three and a half years later, Panda is still with us and seems to still catch us off guard.Enough is enough.

What I intend to show you throughout this piece is that the original Panda questionnaire still remains a powerful predictive tool to wield in defense of what can be a painful organic traffic loss. By analyzing the winner/loser reports of Panda 4.1 using standard Panda surveys, we can determine whether Google’s choices are still in line with their original vision. So let’s dive in.

The process

The first thing we need to do is acquire a winners and losers list. I picked this excellentone from SearchMetrics although any list would do as long as it is accurate. Second, I proceeded to run a Panda questionnaire with 10 questions on random pages from each of the sites (both the winners and losers). You can run your own Panda survey by following Distilled and Moz’s instructions here or just use PandaRisk like I did. After completing these analyses, we simply compare the scores across the board to determine whether they continue to reflect what we would expect given the original goals of the Panda algorithm.

The aggregate results

I actually want to do this a little bit backwards to drive home a point. Normally we would build to the aggregate results, starting with the details and leaving you with the big picture. But Pandais a big-picture kind of algorithmic update. It is specially focused on the intersection of myriad features, the sum is greater than the parts. While breaking down these features can give us some insight, at the end of the day we need to stay acutely aware that unless we do well across the board, we are at risk.

Below is a graph of the average cumulative scores across the winners and losers. The top row are winners, the bottom row are losers. The left and right red circles indicate the lowest and highest scores within those categories, and the blue circle represents the average. There is something very important that I want to point out on this graph.The highest individual average score of all the losers is less than the lowest average score of the winners. This means that in our randomly selected data set, not a single loser averaged as high a score as the worst winner. When we aggregate the data together, even with a crude system of averages rather than the far more sophisticated machine learning techniques employed by Google, there is a clear disparity between the sites that survive Panda and those that do not.

It is also worth pointing out here that there is no positive Panda algorithm to our knowledge. Sites that perform well on Panda do not see boosts because they are being given ranking preference by Google, rather their competitors have seen rankings loss or their own previous Panda penalties have been lifted. In either scenario, we should remember that performing well on Panda assessments isn’t going to necessarily increase your rankings, but it should help you sustain them.

Now, let’s move on to some of the individual questions. We are going to start with the least correlated questions and move to those which most strongly correlate with performance in Panda 4.1. While all of the questions had positive correlations, a few lacked statistical significance.

Insignificant correlation

The first question which was not statistically significant in its correlation with Panda performance was “This page has visible errors on it”. The scores have been inverted here so that the higher the score, the fewer the number of people who reported that the page has errors. You can see that while more respondents did say that the winners had no visible errors, the difference was very slight. In fact, there was only a 5.35% difference between the two. I will save comment on this until after we discuss the next question.

The second question which was not statistically significant in its correlation with Panda performance was “This page has too many ads”. The scores have once again been inverted here so that the higher the score, the fewer the number of people who reported that the page has too many ads. This was even closer. The winners performed only 2.3% better than the losers in Panda 4.1.

I think there is a clear takeaway from these two questions. Nearly everyone gets the easy stuff right, but that isn’t enough. First, a lot of pages just have no ads whatsoever because that isn’t their business model. Even those that do have ads have caught on for the most part and optimized their pages accordingly, especially given that Google has other layout algorithms in place aside from Panda. Moreover, content inaccuracy is more likely to impact scrapers and content spinners than most sites, so it is unsurprising that few if any reported that the pages were filled with errors. If you score poorly on either of these, you have only begun to scratch the surface, because most websites get these right enough.

Moderate correlation

A number of Panda questions drew statistically significant difference in means but there was still substantial crossover between the winners and losers.Whenever the average of the losers was greater than the lowest of the winners, I considered it only a moderate correlation. While the difference between means remained strong, there was still a good deal of variance in the scores.

The first of these to consider was the question as to whether the content was “trustworthy”. You will notice a trend in a lot of these questions that there is a great deal of subjective human opinion. This subjectivity plays itself out quite a bit when the topics of the site might deal with very different categories of knowledge. For example, a celebrity fact site might be very trustworthy (although the site might be ad-laden) and an opinion piece in the New Yorker on the same celebrity might not be seen as trustworthy – even though it is plainly labeled as opinion. The trustworthy question ties back to the “does this page have errors” question quite nicely, drawing attention to the difference between a subjective and objective question and the way it can spread the means out nicely when you ask a respondent to give more of a personal opinion. This might seem unfair, but in the real world your site and Google itself is being judged by that subjective opinion, so it is understandable why Google wants to get at it algorithmically. Nevertheless, there was a strong difference in means between winners and losers of 12.57%, more than double the difference we saw between winners and losers on the question of Errors.

Original content has long been a known requirement of organic search success, so no one was surprised when it made its way into the Panda questionnaire. It still remains an influential piece of the puzzle with a difference in mean of nearly 20%. It was barely ruled out from being a heavily correlated feature due to one loser edging out a loss against the losers’ average mean. Notice though that one of the winners scored a perfect 100% on the survey. This perfect score was received despite hundreds of respondents.It can be done.

As you can imagine, perception on what is and is not an authority is very subjective. This question is powerful because it pulls in all kinds of assumptions and presuppositions about brand, subject matter, content quality, design, justification, citations, etc. This likely explains why this question is beleaguered by one of the highest variances on the survey. Nevertheless, there was a 13.42% difference in means. And, on the other side of the scale, we did see what it is like to have a site that is clearly not an authority, scoring the worst possible 0% on this question. This is what happens when you include highly irrelevant content on your site just for the purpose of picking up either links or traffic. Be wary.

Everyone hates the credit card question, and luckily there is huge variance in answers. At least one site survived Panda despite scoring 5% on this question. Notice that there is a huge overlap between the lowest winner and the average of the losing sites. Also, if you notice by the placement of the mean (blue circle) in the winners category, the average wasn’t skewed to the right indicating just one outlier. There was strong variance in the responses across the board. The same was true of the losers. However, with a +15% difference in means, there was a clear average differentiation between the performance of winners and losers. Once again, though, we are drawn back to that aggregate score at the top, where we see how Google can use all these questions together to build a much clearer picture of site and content quality. For example, it is possible that Google pays more attention to this question when it is analyzing a site that has other features like the words “shopping cart” or “check out” on the homepage.

I must admit that the bookmarking question surprised me. I always considered it to be the most subjective of the bunch. It seemed unfair that a site might be judged because it has material that simply doesn’t appeal to the masses. The survey just didn’t bear this out though. There was a clear difference in means, but after comparing the sites that were from similar content categories, there just wasn’t any reason to believe that a bias was created by subject matter. The 14.64% difference seemed to be, editorially speaking, related more to the construction of the page and the quality of the content, not the topic being discussed. Perhaps a better way to think about this question is:would you be embarrassed if your friends knew THIS was the site you were getting your information from rather than another.

This wraps up the 5 questions that had good correlations but substantial enough variance that it was possible for the highest loser to beat out the average winner. I think one clear takeaway from this section is that these questions, while harder to improve upon than the Low Ads and No Errors questions before, are completely within the webmaster’s grasp. Making your content and site appear original, trustworthy, authoritative, and worthy of bookmarking aren’t terribly difficult. Sure, it takes some time and effort, but these goals, unlike the next, don’t appear that far out of reach.

Heavy correlation

The final three questions that seemed to distinguish the most between the winners and losers of Panda 4.1 all had high difference-in-means and, more importantly, had little to no crossover between the highest loser and lowest winner. In my opinion, these questions are also the hardest for the webmaster to address. They require thoughtful design, high quality content, and real, expert human authors.

The first question that met this classification was “could this content could appear in print”. With a difference in mean of 22.62%, the winners thoroughly trounced the losers in this category. Their sites and content were just better designed and better written. They showed the kind of editorial oversight you would expect in a print publication. The content wasn’t trite and unimportant, it was thorough and timely.

The next heavily correlated question was whether the page was written by experts. With over a 34% difference in means between the winners and losers, andliterally no overlap at all between the winners’ and losers’ individual averages, it was clearly the strongest question. You can see why Google would want to look into things like authorship when they knew that expertise was such a powerful distinguisher between Panda winners and losers. This really begs the question – who is writing your content and do your readers know it?

Finally, insightful analysis had a huge difference in means of +32% between winners and losers. It is worth noting that the highest loser is an outlier, which is typified by the skewed mean (blue circle) being closer to the bottom that the top. Most of the answers were closer to the lower score than the top. Thus, the overlap is exaggerated a bit. But once again, this just draws us back to the original conclusion – that the devil is not in the details, the devil is in the aggregate. You might be able to score highly on one or two of the questions, but it won’t be enough to carry you through.

The takeaways

OK, so hopefully it is clear that Panda really hasn’t changed all that much. The same questions we looked at for Panda 1.0 still matter. In fact, I would argue that Google is just getting better at algorithmically answering those same questions, not changing them. They are still the right way to judge a site in Google’s eyes. So how should you respond?

The first and most obvious thing is you should run a Panda survey on your (or your clients’) sites. Select a random sample of pages from the site. The easiest way to do this is get an export of all of the pages of your site, perhaps from Open Site Explorer, put them in Excel and shuffle them. Then choose the top 10 that come up. You can follow the Moz instructions I linked to above, do it at PandaRisk, or just survey your employees, friends, colleagues, etc. While the latter probably will be positively biased, it is still better than nothing. Go ahead and get yourself a benchmark.

The next step is to start pushing those scores up one at a time. Igive some solid examples on the Panda 4.0 release article about improving press release sites, but there is another better resource that just came out as well. Josh Bachynski released an amazing set of known Panda factors over at his website The Moral Concept. It is well worth a thorough read. There is a lot to take in, but there are tons of easy-to-implement improvements that could help you out quite a bit. Once you have knocked out a few for each of your low-scoring questions, run the exact same survey again and see how you improve. Keep iterating this process until you beat out each of the question averages for winners. At that point, you can rest assured that your site is safe from the Panda by beating the devil in the aggregate.

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There are some things in life you don’t truly understand until you experience them. I was given plenty of parenting advice when my son was born, but it only took me so far. Nothing prepared me for the first time our baby decided to roll over… right off the bed onto the floor (luckily we had a pile of laundry serving as a cushion). If you’ve never been a parent, you simply don’t have a lot of personal experience to draw from. It’s a complete trial by fire, full of missteps, emotions, and anxiety.

In a way, starting Greenlane was a similar experience. Greenlane Search Marketing, LLC is my startup boutique SEO agency. It started in 2005 as a sole proprietorship consulting practice. It was my baby, and I had to let it grow up. Now it’s a partnership between myself and a long-time colleague Keith Urban (not the singer). However, differing from the parenting example, I did have some practical experience to guide me this time. I ran an SEO department in a major digital marketing agency. Regardless, it became very clear we didn’t know a thing about truly running an agency. We were new parents.

What to expect when you’re expecting

We expected to be busy. We knew we’d make mistakes, and we thought we had a solid business plan in place. In the end we were busier than expected, made more mistakes than we care to admit, and our plan fell apart on a weekly basis. But I’m proud (and relieved) to say we’re successful. We have a great staff of smart SEOs and digital marketers. We have happy clients. We have a great network of people to tap into. We’re profitable, targeting half a million in fee revenue by the end of 2014. We survived year one, where 25% of startups crash. We’re on yet another phase of growth, with our legal and taxation items well managed, our employment under control, and the company as a whole being positioned to overcome year two.

For me, that’s an enormous win.

Specifically, what was our secret? Hell if I know. But I think it’s this fuzzy formula: Take what you hear, mixed with what you’ve experienced in life, multiplied by your best guess, and divide by quick, brave decisions. But we also had a motto, one that became our backbone: “Always make it better!”

Making it better for you and your clients

This is a post about some of the more conceptual, “outside the normal” things we implemented to constantly improve our company from the start. These are based on my life experiences and recent business victories. My hope is that this will serve as fodder for your own company, even if you’re not the proprietor. This post is not about tax management, or accounting, or filings—this is about the day-to-day behavioral things that can make your digital marketing company a great place to be, to the benefit of you and your clients.

And to sprinkle in a little fun, since I said life experience fed into many of our first year decisions, I’ll supplement each section with something from my own awkward photo album.

On to the tips…

#1 – Think about your group experiences

For those who played team sports, remember when your parents said, “One day this will make you better at your job!” Go tell them they were right. Working as a team is an invaluable skill, improved only through experience and introspection. We’ve all engaged in group experiences, from grade school to our earliest jobs. Everyone has some kind of group or department participation to draw on. Maybe it’s as simple as cub scouts, a yearbook committee, or in my case, a rock band.

Additionally, we’ve all either seen—or have been—the flunky in the group, doing the least amount to make the group as a whole succeed. There’s also the opposite—a “Johnny-Come-Lately” who shows up with good intentions but sticks a giant crowbar into the gears, grinding progress to a screeching halt. We’ve seen the drama and anger that comes from personalities that just don’t mix. Nothing slows down momentum more than an unfocused crew rowing in different directions. An agency is no different. You will always have bosses, clients, and employees that behave or think differently than you. You simply need to learn how to overcome.

Someone once told me you can’t be a boss and a friend. I’ve never disagreed with something so hard in my life. A friendship presents an amazing bond of trust. At Greenlane we’ve carefully selected co-workers who we enjoy being around. We all have different talents and roles in the company, but you see virtually no instances of “pulling rank” over anyone else. There’s a respect that drives each of us to do a good job for each other. It creates more open and creative dialogue. If you don’t feel like you have anything to prove, you can more easily pause, listen, and learn. We don’t want to let each other down, but we all feel empowered to counter an idea without fear. The best idea wins, and our clients (as well as ourselves) become more educated. We’ve nurtured a really powerful environment. The bigger your group, the harder this is, but certainly not impossible.

We take the same approach with bringing on clients. We call them partners—a term I took from an old gig. Just as we are being paid to help businesses be successful, their actions have a lot of bearing on our success as a vendor—not to mention our own happiness. I’ll often tell a prospective partner, “just as you’re auditioning us, we’re auditioning you too.” That could come off cocky, but any prospects we lost for that statement were probably not going to last in the long run. In fact, I ask all prospective clients to first read our website, where we openly talk about the kind of clients we’re looking for. About two-thirds return super qualified, with the remainder vanishing forever. Those that return often say, “you are exactly what we’re looking for.” It’s a bit like online dating.

I wish we could say we’ve never lost a client due to poor performance. We have. Two of them actually. But in retrospect, this provided good lessons on where we needed to improve. In one case it was due to never being on the right wavelength to begin with, and the other was simply based on poor communicating. We largely (and swiftly) pivoted internally to make sure we never make those mistakes again. As a company, we were all just rowing the wrong way. Catching it early allowed for a very quick adjustment.

By the way, I’m well aware that some internal hierarchies don’t allow you to have a say on the clients that come in. While that is unfortunate, it is also common. But what’s to stop you from climbing the totem pole and pleading your case?

The TL;DR tips:

Don’t just act like you’re interested in every word of your clients and employees, truly be interested. This is their time to talk, and your time to pause, listen, and ask valuable questions. Work together!

Ask your clients questions. Let them understand it’s your job to pull information out of them. Don’t be a yes man; be a friendly challenger in order to get everyone nodding in the same direction.

Work with your team, not against them. If you’re not actively on the account and their day-to-day work, be careful not to break the flow of the meeting throwing out ideas that counter the direction the account managers want to go. Get yourself on the same page, even if you’re the boss.

Have a postmortem on every lost employee or client account, and drop your defenses. Try to figure out what could have been improved as a group.

You’ve been an SEO for over 15 years? Good for you. Now sit down and listen to everyone else’s ideas. Be an equal.

#2 – The people you meet could become important

I’m often asked how we perform lead generation. Our primarily lead source is our network. Keith and I are very lucky in that regard, both coming from the big agency world. Big agencies seem to organically create seedlings that go off to start new companies or work with other established businesses. From former clients to former co-workers, developing serendipity every chance you get, should be a 24/7 goal.

You never know when someone you’ve met will hit it big. If you leave a good impression, they may invite you to their next party.

Digital marketing is one of those rare industries. There are millions of lawyers and accountants, as well as designers. There are relatively few SEOs, PPC experts or affiliate marketers. Make the right impression and your name will get passed around quickly. If you have a bad reputation, or are generally unliked, the word spreads just as fast. I’ve picked against vendors for my clients (or when I worked in-house) simply based on how phony they came off. I’ll probably have this put on my tombstone because I say it so much, “Perception Is Reality.” Let that one sink in. It doesn’t mean “fake it,” but be genuine and supportive.

I wrote a post that I still think about often. It was called ”Create Your Own SEO Serendipity.” I don’t know how, or where, or why I started doing it, but I’ve been in the “serendipity” game for a long time. “Karma” might be a possible synonym. Building up your network is one part of the puzzle, but building it so you’re memorable is a whole other piece that may require a bit of introspection on your end.

In hindsight, I spent my entire professional career mirroring my personal life—be good and helpful to everyone you meet. Sure you get burned if others take advantage, but when a referral comes in from an old colleague, I’m thrilled. It’s that warm feeling that makes “doing business” pretty damn fun.

The TL;DR tips:

Stay in touch with everyone you can by any means necessary. The tiniest little gestures—like endorsing a skill or expertise on LinkedIn, or buying someone a beer at a convention—can sometimes bring you top of mind when you need it most.

In my experience job titles don’t necessarily mean everything. Personality and kindness go further. Always be willing to support someone’s little needs. Free advice or work can turn into major opportunities.

Answer everyone’s emails, tweets, texts, whatever. Very few of us really can’t find the time.

Don’t just wait for people to call you. If you generally feel good about all your encounters, there’s nothing wrong with reaching out and saying, “Thanks for the great talk at the meetup last night. I wanted to see if I could help you solve that problem we were talking about.”

Create serendipity every day.

Create serendipity every day (worth mentioning twice!!!).

#3 – Hire people smarter than you

Around 2009, I remember the CEO of GSI Commerce said this at a company meeting I attended (paraphrasing)—”I built this company by hiring people smarter than me.” This off-hand comment was a real wake-up call for me. He’s since sold his company to eBay, and moved on to restart something new. If this tip helped make someone a billionaire, there must be something to it

My partner and I didn’t read many business books. Personally, I tried, but rejected most of them. I stubbornly refused to buy into some of the concepts. However, there were a few where I recognized common threads. Books likeGood to Great, How To Think Like A CEO, The Outsiders, and The Corner Office didn’t have a “fake it until you make it,” or “kill or be killed” lesson. Instead, they highlighted leading by example, taking calculated risks, being human, and learning from everyone around you.

We candidly tell our prospects that we hire people with unique experience for the sole purpose of supporting the clients. We reveal that Keith’s background is in data and analytics, Mike’s is in design and development, Jon’s is in PR and outreach, and so on. We’re not all experts at everything. We’re very clear that any of our team may work on an account dependent on a given strategy. It’s honest and realistic, and goes over well with prospects. Meanwhile, in the office, we have a lot of co-mingling, where each teammate may join another to work out a specific problem. I’m the old dog in the group, but I’ll tell you the honest truth—I learn something every day from this team.

The client wins, my company improves, and my own personal development grows. What more could anyone want out of a job?

The TL;DR tips:

Let smarter (or more experienced) people help guide you. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Don’t act like you know it all. Your employees and your clients will see right through this.

If you don’t know the answer, let your clients know that you may have someone in your fold that might have the answers. When your company is hired, so is your entire organization. There’s nothing wrong with this!

Encourage your team to speak their mind, take a chance, and kick your ass. When they do, give them a high-five.

#4 – Don’t be so serious

Last but not least, have fun.

Keith and I don’t need to remind ourselves why we took this risk. It’s fun every day. Business is a game, and we’re enjoying our time on the field. No more toxic relationships, no more loss of control, and no more sitting in the “peanut gallery” watching other people do it wrong.

Be serious enough to hit your deliverables, make your marks count, and help your clients win. But why not do it with a smile? I’ve always heard that working in marketing and advertising is one of the most stressful jobs you could have. It doesn’t have to be.

We didn’t build our company with a textbook or a degree. The more I experience, the more I see most people in our field didn’t follow a rule book either. Great businesses are managed by CEOs who take chances, with varied personality traits and levels of intelligence—something school doesn’t necessarily teach anyway. For years I thought I’d have to be an “American Psycho” type business-genius with an MBA, a big vocabulary, a clean haircut, and a country club membership. I have none of those. In the end, I honestly believe we were guided by our own experience, serendipity, and common sense. It’s been a great ride so far, with a lot more learnings—and laughs—to be had.

Besides, if the business folds tomorrow, at least I achieved the biggest thing on my bucket list. So there’s that.

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Dear reader, I am of course kidding. Sadly, the future of marketing is not burritos.

In truth, dear reader, as much as I’d love to tell you the future of marketing is as straight-forward as a particular foodstuff, I’d be doing us all a grave disservice.

I got to thinking about this particular topic a few months ago when prepping for SMX Munich. I’ve been working in this industry for about 7 years, which makes me a comparative youngster, but nonetheless, during that time we’ve seen huge changes.

Remember when keyword density was a thing?

You’d see these sites which huge, apparently empty footers. You’d hit ctrl+a to reveal the densely packed keywords in text the same colour as the background.

Remember how strongly weighted anchor text was?

It was so strongly weighted, we were able to do stuff like this:

Over the years there have been many updates, and some of the most interesting include:

2009: Vince saw big brands get a boost

2010: Caffeine saw a new web indexing system

2011: Panda saw a crackdown on “thin” content

2012: Venice saw localised results ranking for general or broad queries without a geographic modifier

2012: Penguin saw a crackdown on low quality links

2013: Hummingbird saw a move from indexing to understanding

All of which means that, today, search queries which shouldn’t work do in fact work:

This is the sort of query my dear Mother has been typing into search engines for years. Historically these sorts of queries simply didn’t yield the results she was looking for. Today, with increasing frequency, they do.

These sorts of developments are unquestionably good for users, however they may not be quite so good for publishers who rely on ad revenue, and indeed for brands.

A search like this will yield the result directly in the SERP; there’s no need to click through to a website. There are many other examples of this:

Try queries like “how many calories in an egg”, or “how tall is Jason Priestley”.

But it’s not just informational queries that have been affected by changes to the SERPs. A search for “flights from London to Munich” sees the first organic result pushed way below the fold:

It’s fair to say that it’s getting a lot tougher out there. But it’s not just search that’s changing…

Wearable tech is causing a stir

Not too long ago, a woman named Sarah Slocum claimed to have been attacked for wearing Google Glass in a bar in San Francisco. There have been many conflicting accounts of what actually happened that night, and I’m not in a position to comment either way. However, what I think is interesting is the backlash which has ensued against this technology.

As a result, many establishments are banning customers from using Google Glass in their premises.

Just to be clear, I’m not necessarily saying that Google Glass usage won’t ever be accepted, but it’s important to understand that when humans and technology collide, things get complicated.

Regardless of the future of Google Glass, device usage is changing

Mobile used to mean “away from your PC,” but today, 77% of mobile searches are completed in a location where a PC is available (source).

57% of the time when we’re using a smartphone we’re also using another device

67% of the time when we’re using a PC we’re also using another device

75% of the time when we’re using a tablet we’re also using another device

77% of the time when we’re watching TV we’re also using another device

TV doesn’t mean *on* a TV anymore

5% of homes in the US don’t have a TV, and this zero-TV group is growing. The US had more than 5 million zero-TV households in 2013, up from 2 million in 2007. But that doesn’t mean they’re not watching TV: 67% just get their TV content on other devices.

Why?

Traditional TV scheduling limits people who don’t want limits. They want to watch TV whenever and wherever it suits them.

This means TV advertising is also changing

As audiences continue to fragment, the reach of TV advertisements is becoming a problem. Many are simply switching and showing their ads online; YouTube ads, for example, are becoming more prevalent. However, I think this fails to take into account the difference in consumers’ mindsets.

Now I don’t love watching ads on TV, but I’m reasonably comfortable with it. Most of the time when I’m watching TV I’ll put up with the ads because I figure that the ads are the price I pay for watching the shows I want to watch.

However, when a friend sends me a link to a YouTube video, at the point at which the pre-roll ad starts playing I don’t know for sure this is a video I *really* want to watch. As such the pre-roll ad maddens me. Many others also feel the same. I sit, primed to skip the ad as those 5 seconds crawl by.

Right now, advertisers have failed to take into account these different modes of human behaviour. Pre-roll ads on YouTube are not the same as ad on TV. We react differently to them. I think in the future pre-roll ads either need to change, or they won’t survive.

It’s not just TV; the way we consume *all* content is changing

Mitchell Kapour once said “Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”

To combat this issue we all uses filters (to some degree) to get our content. We may filter by publisher, i.e. we’ll only consume content from certain sites (as opposed to trying to consume *all* the content). Or we’ll have trusted curators feed us content (this is what’s often happening on Twitter; you’ll read the content the people you follow and trust recommend).

However, our technology also protects us from unwanted content:

The algorithm which determines what appears in your Facebook feed is based on your previous interactions. As such you’ll see more content from those friends who’s updates you like and comment on than those you never interact with.

Similarly, if you’ve previously “liked” a brand page on Facebook, but then never interact with any of their content in your feed, you’ll stop seeing that content.

It’s not just Facebook, since Gmail launched the tabbed inbox, unsurprisingly, open rates are down.

Permission marketing may no longer be enough

All of this leads me to believe that permission marketing may no longer be enough. All of those permission assets we spent years building—email lists, active Facebook pages, etc.—are likely to become less and less effective in terms of reach.

Wait, what are you saying here?

Don’t panic. I’ve not tricked you into reading yet another “[insert your marketing tactic of choice] is dead” post. But things are changing, and they’re changing rapidly.

Online-first content

Many of the most successful pieces of content we’ve seen online actually existed offline first. So we’ve seen many examples of ads created for TV do well online; examples include Old Spice, and Evian Rollerbabies. But I think we’re seeing an interesting trend toward content that was created specifically for an online audience.

Dear reader, allow me to introduce you to the only pre-roll ad I’ve ever elected not to skip.

Now clearly, I can’t get it to run like a pre-roll, but you can do this for yourself.

Click play, then position your mouse over the pause button.

Watch for five seconds.

Let me know if this piqued your interest sufficiently that you wanted to watch the whole thing

So what does the future hold?

I wanted to round this up by making some predictions. Some are “safe,” some are less so. But where’s the fun in telling you stuff you already knew?

“Safe” predictions

We’ll see more devices being adopted which will lead to more technical challenges as we’ll need to ensure everything we create works across these devices.

We’ll be under even more pressure to measure everything more accurately. We’ll need to track people, not sessions and figure out multi-channel attribution properly.

We’ll be even less reliant on organic search than we are today. Being overly reliant on one channel is too risky.

A “less-safe” Prediction

There will be a deluge of content. But no content fatigue. Filters will become so sophisticated that people just won’t see it.

Somewhat “out there” prediction:

Only brands that stand for something will survive.

In Europe and the US people wouldn’t care if 92% of brands disappeared (source).

In search we’re perhaps more keenly aware of this than other marketers. We’ve seen many affiliates fall thanks to changes in the algorithm, never to return. Only the affiliates that were also recognisable brands survived.

Why?

Well people would think that Google was “broken” if major brands didn’t show up for relevant queries; that’s why major brands make it back into the index fairly quickly, even if they don’t play by Google’s rules.

But it goes deeper than that. Consumers are more savvy today than they once were. If they actively dislike a brand, or what they stand for, they have the tools at their disposal to easily go elsewhere. If your brand doesn’t stand for something, or people don’t like what it stands for they are easily able to find alternatives. Technology has empowered people in ways previously unimaginable.

But being ‘big’ isn’t enough. If you want to ensure your brand retains visibility in the future I think the only way will be to ensure people love your brand enough to search for you by name.

Contrast these two searches:

The search for “BBC weather” doesn’t yield a summary of the weather direct in the SERP. Instead, BBC weather, quite rightly, ranks first.

Now of course there are no guarantees for the future, but I’d suggest that a branded search is unlikely to yield a result where said brand is pushed below a Google property.

Only time will tell.

When we think about the future of marketing it’s easy to slip into the trap of thinking purely about technological challenges. However, the truth is that marketing isn’t changingbecause of technology. Marketing is changing because consumers’ expectations are evolving.

Consumers expect brands to deliver a seamless experience, regardless of their location or the device they’re using.

When they speak, they expect brands to respond.

They aren’t interested in your self-serving messaging, or your attempts to be ‘down with the kids’, but they’ll happily be entertained.

Most of all you need them to love your brand and love your marketing. So much so, that they’ll actively seek it our for themselves and share it with their friends.

I believe that as an industry we will evolve.

I’ve only been in the industry for 7 years, many of you have been doing this for much longer than me and I *know* how adaptable you are.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the future, and your thoughts on my predictions.

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